Currently, most whitepapers cite scientific papers, but academia people get little from the ICOs.

Here is a proposal how science could be funded by ICOs:

An ICO would voluntary commit, say 1% of proceeds to the science used by the technology.

The LATEX citations section of the whitepaper would include allocations of the proceeds in percentages. Basically, the whitepaper author would decide to allocate, say, 7% to one citation, 5% to another citation etc., the total being 100%.

Then in a pass-through fashion, each scientific paper would voluntarily allocate the percentages to the papers it cites. So if my paper cites papers X,Y, Z I could allocate 40% to myself, 15% X, 20% to Y and 25% to Z.

As a result, you could have every paper to include smart-contract readable allocations, and then a smart contract would essentially create a network flow of money from ICOs to papers cited in the whitepaper, then to second level citations, third level citations etc.

When a professor moves to one university to another, she could “take” her papers with her, so the university would receive funding from the sum of contributions of its faculty.

Interesting! Basically an airdrop into a reputation system for academia. I’d support this.

Another idea is that at the time that they write their papers, scientists could issue tokens for the paper and if desired sell them; then the airdrop would go to the token holders. This could allow scientists to pre-fund work, as well as creating a prediction market for how influential work would be in the future, which may be useful to society for informational purposes.

@kladkogex I’m glad someone posted about this. I had some thoughts along these lines as well -> here. They’re a bit messy, so I’ll just summarize below.

Research coin distribution event (ICO? or just give it researchers and other stake holders)

Each paper, when hits preprint server starts a game.

perhaps authors of papers have to stake money as well???

Owners stake research coin so they can peer review this paper

We gather a set pool of staked money for the paper

They decide on the validity of the paper

And how to initially distribute the distribution of said paper’s individual token in proportion to owners and citations to other papers.

This is some type of schelling point game.

Accurate schelling point people are rewarded with some new research coin (in some proportion to how much was staked)

Slashing the stake of bad reporters

Once paper schelling point is set, then distribute locked research token recursively to owners of said paper’s token with pro rata of schelling point.

Intuition is that peer reviews want to review important papers and therefore will stake tokens to do this.

More important papers get more staked token

More token flows recursively to the owners of the paper’s token.

I guess this is technically securitizing basic research IP, lol

Markets develop for individual paper’s token. These may later on yield great research results and therefore generate recursive payments of research token. As more papers get published, flow of money goes recursively to the paper parent papers/owners. The price of the token’s paper, denominated in research coin may

Recursive ownership is important because it incentivizes research with the greatest NPV in terms of research coin.

Researchers who publish should get steady payouts as more papers cite them, so they can continue to fund more research.

I once did a braindump of possible ideas to make this happen (although they are good intuition, I don’t believe they work in practice). The general idea is to combine prediction markets with peer review:

I believe that the right idea is to get rewarded by the papers use as in quoted or referenced, so for a researcher a kind of reputation system, then I also like the idea of @vbuterin to be able to pre-sell access to a specific research area, the only question there is if it could skew the research in a specific way, but I believe that finding new ways to found research should really be a core topic for ICO/crypto investors.

While I really like the general use case, I really hope this technology does not result in a popularization of science, in the sense that only really popular research gets proper funding, while newer and fundamental research gets less funding.

I do really like this idea though for the development of open source code and funneling the ICO capital through the dependencies. So proper general cryptography libraries for example get funded by multiple ICO’s.

So for example:
ICO for new Blockchain protocol where 60% of the received funds are used for the development. Then they can spend that by allocating 50% to their own code, and 10% to 5 big dependencies for example. Those dependencies can do the same again.

I have always thought that the white paper itself is not required to be a smart-contract, not on it’s entirety but a reflection of the paper document, so in a similar fashion to how gas in managed, the ICO company can set a price for the citation and the author of the paper can decide to accept it or not.

Having the white paper in the blockchain will come with additional benefits in terms of accountability but they are outside the scope of this thread, I’ve designed a contract for a white paper, let me know if anyone’s interested.

Please note that this is a work in progress, it means that it’s untested and is lacking functionality, the main intention is to define how a white paper could be represented in the blockchain, so at this point it’s better if you think of it as pseudo-code.

Also, I haven’t though about the citation part up until I read this post, so that functionality is not there but I’ll be adding it gradually.

I was thinking about such system but from another angle. What if to create kickstarter for scientists. Scientist or developer may to make a proposal to community to solve some problem and provide proofs of experience to realise it. Community may support his work in safe manner paying for milestones. It’s some kind of (DA)ICO but in model when results became a public property after some time. It’s a kind of open source but in science.